"The Uncertainty of Surrender: POWs in Captivity" explores the harrowing experiences of prisoners of war during World War II. Featuring Richard B. Frank and Jason Dawsey, PhD, chaired by Günter Bischof, PhD, the session examines the grim realities of captivity in both the Pacific and European theaters and the contrasting approaches of Japan and Germany to POW treatment.
This session is part of The National WWII Museum's 2024 International Conference on World War II presented by the Pritzker Military Foundation, on behalf of the Pritzker Military Museum & Library. For more information: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/2024-international-conference-world-war-ii
The International Conference on World War II is the premier adult educational event bringing together the best and brightest scholars, authors, historians, and witnesses to history from around the globe to discuss key battles, personalities, strategies, issues, and controversies of the war that changed the world. Joining the featured speakers are hundreds of attendees who travel from all over the world to learn and connect with each other through engaging discussions, question-and-answer periods, book signings, and receptions throughout the weekend.
Richard Frank is an internationally recognized leading authority on the Asia-Pacific war. He published his first book, Guadalcanal, in 1990. His second work, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (1999) has been called one of the six best books in English about World War II. Both Random House books won awards and became main selections of the History Book Club. In 2007, he completed MacArthur as part of the Palgrave Great Generals Series. The first volume of his trilogy on the Asia-Pacific war in 1937–1945, Tower of Skulls, was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History in 2021. Besides his numerous appearances on television and radio, he was a consultant for the epic HBO miniseries The Pacific. He is a founding member of The National WWII Museum’s Presidential Counselors advisory board.
Jason Dawsey is an assistant teaching professor of history at Arizona State University. He previously served as Research Historian at the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy. A native of Columbia, Mississippi, Dawsey received his PhD in 2013 from the University of Chicago and has taught at the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. His interests include the history of the European Left (particularly the anti-Nazi resistance), debates about the impact of technology on modern life, and the history of Holocaust consciousness. As part of his long-term research on the German-Jewish technology critic and anti-nuclear militant Günther Anders (1902–1992), Dawsey coedited (with Günter Bischof and Bernhard Fetz) The Life and Work of Günther Anders: Émigré, Iconoclast, Philosopher, Man of Letters. He is the author of “After Hiroshima: Günther Anders and the History of Anti-Nuclear Critique” in Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought, and Nuclear Conflict, 1945-1990. Dawsey’s recent work includes “American Anti-Stalinists in Defense of the USSR: The Socialist Workers Party, the Nazi-Soviet War, and Intransigent Revolutionism,” a piece about American supporters of Leon Trotsky during World War II included in the book The Eastern Front: War, Myth, and Memory (2024).
Günter Bischof is the former Marshall Plan Professor of History and Director of Center Austria at the University of New Orleans. A native of Austria, he holds a PhD in American History from Harvard University. He is the author of Austria in the First Cold War, 1945–55: The Leverage of the Weak (1999); and Relationships/ Beziehungsgeschichten: Austria and the United States in the Twentieth Century (2014); with Hans Petschar, The Marshall Plan Since 1947: Saving Europe, Rebuilding Austria (2017); and, with Peter Ruggenthaler, Der Kalte Krieg und Österreich: Ein Balanceakt zwischen Ost und West [The Cold War and Austria: Balancing between East and West] (2022). He has coedited 30 volumes of the yearbook Contemporary Austrian Studies, and he is the coeditor of another 20 books on topics of international contemporary history (especially World War II and the Cold War in Central Europe). With Hannes Richter, he did an exhibition and book project for the Austrian Embassy in Washington on the theme of Towards the American Century: Austrians in the United States. He serves as a Presidential Counselor at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans and on the board of the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies